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as the Humanitarian Law Center, the Belgrade Center forHuman Rights and the Helsinki Committee for HumanRights in Serbia. (Most observers have also given praise forachievements in other areas.)Vladimir Petrovic, an academic who was an analyst inthe war crimes prosecutor’s office when first interviewedfor this article, described the problem as “the vacancy inthe middle.” Though the ICTY started with some relativelylow-level offenders, it eventually developed a top-downstrategy. Serbia’s War Crimes Chamber, in contrast, couldtake a bottom-up approach – starting with the lowest-leveloffenders and moving up to the mid-level commandersoutside the ICTY’s range of cases.“The hope was that we would meet somewhere in themiddle,” Petrovic said. If this convergence fails to takeplace, he added, it will create a significant hole in the legalrecord established by the cases.A debate remains over the severity of this shortcoming,as well as its causes. Competing views over these issueshave created tension between Vukcevic’s office andKandic’s Humanitarian Law Center – two institutionsostensibly on the same side of war crimes issues, led by twoindividuals whose public statements about the importanceof accountability efforts often echo each other.Kandic believes that the indictments and some of thechamber’s rulings show an intention to minimize theresponsibility of the state of Serbia, and to focus blameinstead on individual bad apples at the lower level. Oneof the goals of war crimes trials is to establish individualcriminal responsibility for atrocities, something Kandicreadily acknowledges. (One theory in the field of transitionaljustice is that individualizing crimes can help prevent victimpopulations from holding grudges against entire groupsof people.) Still, she contends that indictments that moreaggressively move up the chain of command and betterestablish the context of the crimes would place a moreappropriate emphasis on state institutions. This would bemore consistent with the record established by the ICTY– that much of the Serb wartime leadership engaged in ajoint-criminal enterprise during the conflict.Greater state responsibility might also support legaltheories of liability that Serbia owes reparations to victimsof the wars. Bosnia-Herzegovina sued Serbia before theInternational Court of Justice for alleged violations ofthe Genocide Convention. In a 2007 ruling, the ICJ heldthat the Srebrenica massacre amounted to genocide butthat Serbia was not directly responsible for the acts carriedout by the forces in the area, the Republika Srpska army.The court did hold that Serbia violated the conventionby failing to stop the killings and failing to turn over keysuspects. (Among the controversies of the case, the courtdid not require Serbia to turn over documents that mighthave shed more light on the alleged participation ofYugoslavia’s leadership.)Vukcevic's office has contended that Kandic, who istrained as a sociologist and not a lawyer, is incorrect in herassessments of its performance, and that cases have onlybeen limited by the evidence available. For example, inthe Lovas case against former army officials, among otherdefendants, for the killing of 70 civilians in Lovas, Croatia,in 1991, Kandic criticized the indictment for not targetingany army generals. Vukcevic issued a public response thatthe “the indictment included all individuals for whomit was possible to find evidence of involvement” and that“there was no evidence of [higher-ranking army officers]having any knowledge of the events in Lovas either beforeor during" the commission of the crimes.In responding to questions for this article, Vukcevicsaid that most of the higher-ranking officials have alreadybeen indicted by the ICTY. He said his team operates bythe principles of "independence, resistance to all sorts ofpressures (political ones in particular), and the equality oftreatment for all irrespective of their ethnic backgrounds,religious beliefs or positions in the political and commandstructures." He added that his office is in the early stagesof potential cases against “individuals who occupied highpositions in the state system” during the wars.The Belgrade Center for Human Rights, which untilrecently was led by another of the region’s most respectedactivists (and scholars), Vojin Dimitrijevic, who died Oct. 5at the age of 81, does not believe that the prosecutor’s office“is avoiding the prosecution of the topmost army and policeofficers,” according to a report issued earlier this year. Theorganization instead blames obstructive forces withinthe government and the challenges posed by regionalcooperation, with so many witnesses outside Serbia’sborder. The report noted a number of complications,including that a “considerable number of the Army ofSerbia current command staff” fought during the Kosovowar, and that former Milosevic spokesman Dacic (nowPrime Minister) had a prominent role in the government asa deputy prime minister.One of the most high-profile and controversial of theearly cases before the War Crimes Chamber was broughtin 2005, after the Humanitarian Law Center acquired atape of the notorious Scorpions paramilitary unit executingsix Muslims during the time of the Srebrenica massacresin July 1995. The killings took place in Trnovo, RepublikaSrpska, where the unit had taken their captives. TheHumanitarian Law Center made the tape available to theICTY, which showed it at the Milosevic trial, and to themedia, whose broadcasting of the footage was seen as animportant first step in getting citizens to begin to acceptthat Serbs had committed grave war crimes. The tape alsoresulted in Serb police arresting the perpetrators who werevisible as members of the Scorpions unit; five were indicted,including the commander, Slobodan Medic. Humanrights advocates criticized the indictment for describingL A W D R A G O N 46 I s s u e 13